Happy Sunday

I hope you are having an enjoyable & productive weekend. My sister & I took our four boys to an indoor water park on Friday, & came home yesterday. It's always an adventure - and, exhausting!

My goals for today include:

• Running 6-7 miles
• Doing pilates or yoga this evening after the boys go to bed
• Taking the kids to a fun holiday activity
• Grilling 2 giant Costco packages of chicken for the freezer (well, that will be M)
• Laundry
• Taking the kids to the library
• Returning a gift (if I'm up to braving the mall)
• Calling to organize my Christmas Eve meal (I'm ordering something)
• Determining what to serve next weekend at our holiday get together
• Mapping out my calendar (workouts, kids schedule) and to do lists for Monday-Sunday

In accordance with my plan in December to really dissect our 2013 budget & areas for cutback, I'm posting about one category per day. So far, I've covered mortgage interest (and a potential refi) & our grocery budget.

Today's topic for discussion is . . . Dining Out!

Dining out is an interesting category for us. We focus on eating at home the majority of the time, as well as make it a priority to do one date night per month. Both of those are our grounding goals for this category. However, when looking at our 2012 expenses, we realized that we spent $325/month on dining out in 2012, which is both MUCH higher than I thought, & quite frankly, not inline with our priorities.

Our goal for 2013 is $175/month. This still allows for one splurge date night (a priority for us), and a few casual lunches (Subway, etc) when traveling.

Questions for you: how much do you spend eating out? Creative ways to defray the cost? We like to have wine when we go out, which substantially ups the cost. 

What's on your to do list for today?